Month: November 2018

[CW: distasteful ideologies.]

A student at CUNY, Emily Campbell, recently brought two libfixes to my attention.

The first is -pire, presumably extracted from empire and found in the blend Fempire (an “investment cooperative for FIERCE women”) and in Trumpire, presumably a pejorative meaning something like ‘the world of the Trump family’. Both of these look blend-like in that the base provides a /m/.

In looking for more examples I also discovered a bunch of brand names in -spire, a libfix that appears to have been extracted from inspire. There is Artspire, an art festival, CitySpire, a New York City skyscraper which is more of a dome than a spire (n.), and the tech companies Fundspire, Jobspire, Pinspire, and WeSpire.

A linguistically more interesting example is -cuck. This originates in cuckold, an archaic pejorative referring to the husband of an adulterous woman. How did a (string) prefix become a suffix? Here’s my best guess. First, cuckold obtains a new and more transgressive sense as the name for a genre of pornography in which a (usually white) man is forced to watch as a straight man (usually non-white) has sex with his (usually white) wife or girlfriend. This new racist sense lead to the blend cuckservative, a pejorative for white conservative Western politicians perceived to have betrayed their race (and perhaps also their donor base). While we might expect this would lead to a prefixal reanalysis (and a new libfix *cuck-), what seems to have happened first is cuck was made into a free stem. In informal usage, to cuck (v.) is to embarass, or more specifically emasculate, someone, and a cuck (n.) is someone perceived to be acting against their interests or the interests of their in-group; a class-, race-, or gender-traitor (though a conservative belief system is not necessarily presupposed). It didn’t take long before conservative politicians started using that one on each other. Later, with the fossilization of the incel narrative, we find the suffixal form -cuck as in words like wagecuck ‘wage-slave’ (“whadda schnook!”, I guess), Eurocuck, normcuck, or studycuck, all pejorative (though not necessarily racist).